Grey on Grey

The chickens seem mercifully untroubled by all the chaos around them.

New Territory

I'm sure the builders really appreciate the chickens roosting in their equipment...

Taking Shape

The destruction phase seems to be nearly finished - we found piles of wood in the garage and the walls being re-built when we visited the site recently.



This is the granny flat bathroom and laundry being framed up. After two years of planning, I'm finally getting a feel for what it's going to be like...

Big Bath

It's a good job we're going to have so much hot water for free given the size of our family bath...

Overheads

Here's a glimpse of our gull grey Coloursteel roof that's nearly finished now. We opted for a pale colour that would keep the house cooler in summer and would blend in with the sky rather than stand out.



If you look closely, you'll see the brackets for the solar panels.

And here's the water tank in the loftspace that's going to be connected to the solar panels, supplied by What Power Crisis.



These are the specs in case there's any alternative energy geeks out there reading this post...



The first bit of roof insulation has gone in underneath the water tank. The rest of the roof space will soon be filled up with this natural wool insulation.



And I think this is the underfloor/ceiling insulation, waiting its turn in the shed...

Scheming

We were obliged to pick colours recently for part of our project - the roof and the windows. We opted for gull grey (the roof) and appliance white (the windows). Hopefully the gull grey won't show the peacock poop on the roof...

At the time that we were looking at swatches, I was interested to read this blog entry about naming colours. The survey results reported in the blog show that women come up with many more creative and more varied names for colours than men. But for some reason I think that gull grey and appliance white were probably named by men.

Bedding In

The vegetable patch that we're babysitting over winter is about four times the size of the patch that we had in London and about a quarter of the size of the plot that we're building at our lifestyle block. It's just the right size for getting some practice in. I only have to decide what to sow first, ready for spring...